Re: I should be doing THIS kind of tech writing
During lunch hour today, I drove over to the campus where I'm going to
start slowly whittling away at my MBA, to buy my textbooks for the two
classes I signed up for.
Holy Schnikees! Each book was $97.50 a pop new, and $70-something used!
What the hell am I doing in telecom - I should be writing textbooks! Do
all the authors of these books live in Malibu, or what?
Actually, if you want a chunk of that money, you need to get into publishing, not writing. In most cases, the amount of money that goes to the writer is a small percentage of the total.
That's why many text books are based on information in other text books: the authors usually can't afford the time for original research. This situation often leads to information being repeated endlessly from text book to text book.
For example, Stephen Jay Gould noted that many text books continue to describe the original ancestor of the modern horse as the size of a fox terrier. Noting that few people today had any immediate idea how big a fox terrier was, Gould traced the origin of this comparison to text books from the 1920s, when the fox terrier was a popular breed. The comparison had apparently been repeated without any thought for decades.
--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield
"No person can achieve excellence in a popular genre without a rigorous and undeviating commitment to providing a personal best at all times. At the first moment of compromise - the first 'dumbing down' for "easier' or 'wider' acceptability, the first boilerplating for reasons of simple weariness or an overcommitted schedule - one simply falls into the abyss."
- Stephen Jay Gould, "The True Embodiment of Everything That's Excellent"
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